Month: May 2018

Full sun and warm temperatures (maybe 40 degrees, so “warm” is relative) and we packed the gear, donned the dry suits, marveled at how much snow had melted out from around the tent, and shoved off just ever-so-slightly on the Canadian side of the aquatic border. Getting in the water took some doing and a lot of poking with a couple of sturdy sticks, and then we had to break through the ice block. It was almost entirely slush, so I hacked at it with my paddle, we reversed, we plowed in at full speed, repeat… and a few minutes later, we were on the way.

The Northwest Branch of the St John has a pretty good current this time of year, and since we don’t really know anything about the river save what we could parse out from Google Earth and the topo maps (i.e. not very much at all), we scooted from eddy to eddy trying to gauge each bend and riffle as best we could before committing.

We made it through two sets of small rapids within the first mile or two, probably a class I+ or II, with some good-sized standing waves and bigass MF-ing rocks. The spray deck performed admirably, and I was glad to be in a drysuit from the first wave. Both of us were absolutely ecstatic to be on the water and finally underway.

Then we heard water- BIG water. It was around a sharp curve to the right, so we couldn’t get a great look beyond one obvious VERY big rock on the inside of the curve, and since there was nowhere to pull out we made the call to hold left of center and run it.

…This was maybe not the best call.

As we rounded the bend, we plowed into what was easily a III+ rapid and would probably have been a solid IV if it had been longer. The river dropped about ten feet over the course of 20 yards between several HUGE boulders.

The stupidest part was that we came so damn close to making it through without even getting any water in the boat because it was such a short stretch. We easily cleared the first big rocks, bounced through the first two or three massive standing waves… and then clipped something.

Neither of us saw what it was, but either way the boat went out from under me so fast I barely had enough time to reflect on my life choices before it shoved me underwater. I popped back up, skidded off a rock, and within seconds both of us were swimming the upside-down boat to shore with paddles in hand.

It’s worth noting that Steve’s stupid captain’s hat both stayed on his head AND remained dry.

We coasted into an eddy and flipped the boat back over to assess the damage. Thanks to the spray deck, we only lost a loose Nalgene and a stuff sack of tie downs (my bad- it floated past me in the eddy and I failed to grab it before it sank because like a complete moron I reached for our giant bailing sponge first)… but the very tip of the bow was smashed to hell. It wasn’t anything bad enough to compromise the structural integrity of the boat; the protective end cap had been sheared off and while the float tank was no longer watertight, all the damage was well above the waterline. While it’ll probably be an easy repair once we’re back in civilization, it was pretty sobering and it completely soured Steve’s mood for the rest of the day

He did, however, find the “silver lining” to my rubber boot (which I lost while using it as a bailer) and waded back upriver to get some good photos of the rapid that dented his baby.

Shaken but righted, we got back in and made it about another half mile before we heard more big water. This time we managed to pull over; good thing, too. Fast water and more class III rapids awaited, complete with ice chunks sailing through as the lake behind us cleared out, and more of the same visible down the line at the next bend.

Portage it is! …Through a hellish mix of small scrubby evergreens, downed trees, and thigh-deep snow. It took us all afternoon to get the boat about 200 yards, which was the point when it started to rain and we figured screw it: we’re on the highest ground around and we can already say we probably can’t run the next batch of rapids.

We hung a couple lines, tromped out a place for the tent, and just barely got set up and under cover before it started coming down in earnest.

We’re FINALLY paddling… even if we only made it about three miles. So much for the “easy handful of miles” we were hoping for before the confluence. It looks like we’ll probably spend all day tomorrow portaging.

I feel like I need to give Steve some time alone with the canoe. And the scotch. 🙁

Steve woke up feeling weak and sore from yesterday’s adventure but felt progressively better as the day wore on; I woke up feeling a little queasy and felt progressively worse.

There’s nothing quite like pooping liquid into a thigh-deep posthole and then collapsing into the tent only to find that the smell of your partner’s mashed potatoes makes you so nauseous you openly weep while scrambling to get your head out of the tent. And then barfing while hanging the bear bag. I feel like absolute shit; the small saving grace is that it probably isn’t giardia because we’ve both been drinking the same heavily-filtered water.

The only thing we can think of to do moving-wise is load the boat, get on the water, and try to get as far as we can. Steve’s confident that if we rig to flip and can navigate from eddy to eddy, we ought to be able to find a line and make it through. We have intel from our pre-trip research saying that the paddling’s easy from the confluence with the Daaquam on (in normal weather, anyways, according to a guy who’s paddled it many times… in summer) so we’re just trying to reach that point. We also know there’s a road that crosses the river there, so if we had to we could pull out to portage.

We’re really hit the perfect storm of shitty weather, shitty snow, shitty river, and literal shit. Our bar for misery is at an entirely new level, and this is turning out to be the longest 14 miles of our lives. Both of us are oddly resigned to it; as much as this sucks, freaking out won’t do us any good and we’re sure as shit not quitting.

Feeling a bit better and waking up to sun and warm temperatures gave us the cojones to pack up camp and brave the river. We figured if we’re lucky, we’d be able to run it (rigged to flip, obviously) and maybe even get as far as Ledge Rapids Camp; if we were only a little lucky, we’d make a little headway, pull out to portage, and potentially find a campsite with some more sun exposure.

We were decidedly NOT lucky.

We got the boat packed (which was a huge pain in the ass, waist-deep in a stream with a stiff current while simultaneously fighting the backwash from the eddy on the edge of the rapids) and pushed off… except we didn’t. It took everything we had to get into the main river, and we immediately discovered we couldn’t paddle hard enough to get out of the damned eddy. Blocks of ice the size of small sedans cruised past us, caught in the swirl of the backwash. It was all we could do not to get sucked backwards and recycled into the rapids.

Forcing our way to the bank (about fifty yards from where we put in), we hopped out and lined the boat downstream through a waist-deep UPRIVER current for another 200 yards until we hit a swampy stream outlet that we could pull into. We admitted defeat for the day, and almost immediately it began to rain because WHY FUCKING NOT.

After slogging around in a charming mix of thigh-deep snow over downed trees and swamp water for about an hour trying to find a straightforward portage/campsite/literally any appealing option whatsoever, we gave up and ended up pitching the tent on the only dry ground we could find within feasible walking distance. “Dry ground” is a relative term, since it was actually a snowbank on top of a downed tree in the middle of a swamp, which meant we both had a moat and were about a foot and a half of river rise away from getting flooded out.

“Exhausted” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I still feel like lukewarm dog poop. Steve’s back has started bothering him, and it’s bad enough that he’s actively pretending to be fine. We were so tired we didn’t even cook dinner; we just ate fistfuls of gummies from our sleeping bags.

That said, we’re still doing surprisingly okay. Our gear is dry. We have plenty of food and fuel. We have clean water and the ability to filter more. This sucks a whole bag of fake-cherry-flavored gummy dicks, but we’re still nowhere near dire straights or dangerous conditions.

At some point Maine needs to make up its mind if it wants us gone or to stay here forever. We can’t leave while it’s super shitty, so if this place hates us so much it needs to cut us a little bit of a break so we can GTFO safely because otherwise we’re not moving.

We woke up to… drumroll… rain.

I was still pretty wrecked, so Steve left to go start plotting a portage route while I stayed in camp to hang the bear bag and filter water before heading out to meet him.

Long story short, even that amount of activity was about as much as I could handle and by the time I met him at a logging slash about a mile downriver that afternoon I was completely exhausted. Getting back to the tent was one of the hardest things I’ve ever physically had to do.

I spent the rest of the afternoon passed out cold while poor Steve played Minecraft on his phone.

Dinner was a sad affair- Steve cooked (which should really drive home how wiped out I am, because there’s a lot of things I’ll do before willingly eating his camp food) and then goaded me through about half a portion of rice before I was convinced I might barf again.

Everything about this makes me miserable. I can’t eat; I can barely move around; my partner is stuck literally carrying my load around while I lie here like a useless lump. I still can’t say I regret coming out here (the bar for “better than being at work” is JUST. THAT. LOW) but the misery level has really hit a new record.

I’m desperately hoping I wake up tomorrow feeling close to normal. And that maybe it won’t be raining.

SUNLIGHT. Fucking FINALLY.

Steve immediately began running laps with small items while I broke down camp. I’m still touch and go but feel significantly more human, and since the water is somehow STILL RISING we have no choice but to keep moving.

We got the essentials to the logging slash and I stayed there to rebuild camp while Steve and his obnoxiously long legs kept shuttling gear.

Putting up our loaned 4-season tent by myself in the snow made me understand why my parents never go camping together any more. There are two kinds of people in this world: those you can assemble a tent with without anyone getting stabbed, and those who you will forever want to slit the throats of before systematically hunting down every member of their family. Also, this tent sucks and there’s a good chance I’m going to set it on fire when we get out of this.

The last order of the day was to move the boat. Dry suits on, waist-deep in swamp, dry-heaving the canoe over logs and through piles of brush and moose shit… and we’re at the slash above the next set of rapids.

We have a rock-solid base camp, a textbook bear bag, and our stuff is still dry. Tomorrow we’re going to find a portage route, and hopefully it’ll be smoother sailing. Or walking. Whatever. Hell, if we have to walk to the confluence from here we will- at least we’re moving forward again.

It was sunny when we woke up, and we had a goal: plot a portage route as far as we fucking could. All six (or seven? three? who knows) miles to the Daaquam if we had to, depending on what the water looked like. It finally felt like we had a plan underway and might be able to make some headway.

It was not to be. About a mile from our camp in the logging slash we ran into impassable swampland. We couldn’t even WALK through, much less get the canoe through over waist-deep water and miserable nests of downed trees. The only upside was that there are a few decent spots to put in after the current set of rapids, and we can’t see or hear more after that point, so theoretically if we can get the canoe to there we can at least get a mile or so down the river before potentially having to pull out again.

Even though it was only about 2:30 in the afternoon when we admitted defeat, we dragged ourselves out of the swamp and back to camp and crawled into the tent completely dejected.

Every time we think we’re going to catch a break and make some decent headway, we run into a wall. We knew going into this that this trip would probably be the hardest thing either one of us had ever done, but I think we both thought the tough part would be the Bay of Fundy… which at this point, we’ve had to accept that we’ll never make. This is some Lewis and Clark level shit and we’re both pretty disheartened at the moment.

On top of everything else, the roar of the rapids has been increasing since we began. At the headwaters, it was the rush of the dam. Every site after that, it’s been the rapids we’re currently struggling to get past. I wake up to it and fall asleep to it every. Damned. Day. There’s no escaping the constant reminder of water we can’t paddle and it is MADDENING.

We came out here looking for this type of challenge, so even now I’m not really complaining; there is nobody I can think of that I’ve ever known (save MAYBE my batshit nuts aunt Laurie, who once dump-tackled a drugged-out stranger who tried to steal her backpack in South America) who has done something quite like this. People start the St John and Baker Lake because it’s easier, and they get out around Allagash because that’s an easier end than doing the rest of it. This way makes the St John still feel wild and powerful, not like a sporadically-runnable guidebook attraction. If we had wanted easy, there are a hundred paddling trips we could have done instead that would have involved WAY less effort and misery.

Note to self: find and read more journals of explorers and see if I can read between the lines to find the days where their true feelings are “fuck this, fuck nature, fuck the map, fuck the boat, fuck all of it, we should have brought more alcohol”.

Against all odds, it was damned nice outside when we woke up, so we were up and about early hauling the boat down to the portage route we’d scouted out yesterday. It became clear pretty quickly that we wouldn’t be able to get as far as our original intended put-in; the snow was rotting away underfoot and the terrain was much too varied to safely waddle through with portage packs and a boat.

By the time we got the gear loaded we had gone back and forth a few times about the merits of putting in directly and IMMEDIATELY negotiating some class I+ rapids at high speed vs. lining the boat a hundred yards downriver first.

We lined it. (Sorry, Steve. I know you wanted to hit that run.)

And then, believe it or not, WE GOT IN THE CANOE. AND WE PADDLED. And the SUN was SHINING, and we saw a DUCK, and EVERYTHING WAS GLORIOUS. (Ducks have always been good omens for us. Refer to the Delaware paddling journals for proof.)

…And that lasted all of ten minutes. We made it maybe a mile, then heard fast water.

LOUD fast water.

We couldn’t see anything; the river looked like it continued straight forward and then just… disappeared.

Then we saw a splash of water shoot six or seven feet into the air, and Steve pulled us over so fast my face got rammed into a whole series of overhanging trees.

We tied off the canoe in a chest-deep cedar swamp (in normal water levels, it’d probably have been a lovely dry stroll) and carefully waded to a point where we could climb ashore, then bushwhacked down to check out what turned out to be a hundred yards or so of some of the gnarliest boat-eating rapids I’ve ever seen in person.

The river dropped over a six-foot ledge at the top, then boiled over and around boulders bigger than my car to create massive standing waves. There wasn’t a calm eddy as far as we could see; the entire surface of the river was whitewater. Underlying the unceasing roar of the water was the low grinding of rocks along the river bottom, and periodically a piece of lumber dislodged by the ice floe sailed through at a speed most trees can only dream of.

Honestly, it looked like the kind of thing that might be sort of fun (albeit terrifying) with a rubber raft and a paid professional doing the steering; unfortunately that’s just not the kind of water you take on with seven weeks’ worth of gear and a kevlar canoe.

Despite the soul-crushing discovery that we were going to have to take out and portage AGAIN, we miraculously stumbled through the dense underbrush onto a moose track… which led us to a logging slash… which dumped us onto a very much out-of-use but perfect-for-our-purposes LOGGING ROAD. It paralleled the river and spit us out at an AMAZING campsite on DRY GROUND (not solid snow, not ice, not downed trees, but actual honest-to-God dry ground and pine needles), and after wandering around in the woods for a bit we found a nearly completely clear path between the campsite and our pull-out that allowed us to hike our gear a mile downriver to set up basecamp without either of us getting punched in the face by a tree. (At this point we’ll take even the smallest of things as a victory.)

The goal for tomorrow is to haul the canoe to this new, dry campsite from its safe haven upriver at the edge of the cedar swamp. It’s significantly easier walking than any of our portages so far, but the canoe is still 18.5’ long and wasn’t designed to be threaded between the dense evergreens of the Maine wilderness, so what takes us half an hour in backpacks will probably take us most of the day with the boat.

We’ve got a week’s worth of food remaining if we plan to maintain a respectable caloric intake, and we know the confluence to Allagash could potentially take us four days. This means we’ve got about two days to reach the confluence with the South Branch of the St John before we’re floating down to our resupply on fumes.

BUT. For right now, we’re camped on level dry ground on a ledge overlooking the river. Our stuff is dry, the gentle sound of water against the shoreline is louder than the rapids in the background, and I’m going to sleep like the dead next to my best friend in a spot that probably hasn’t seen humans in over a decade. Things aren’t all bad today.

Plus, you know, I saw a duck, so that’s cool.

Don’t get me wrong, I am ALL FOR wilderness and extremely remote untouched natural beauty. I love the idea of it existing; I love occasionally stumbling across bits of it; I love fighting for its preservation and always will and continue to believe in having to do things “the hard way” if you want to witness some of the wonders that exist in nature.

HOWEVER. I’ll be damned if this logging road wasn’t the most beautiful things I’ve ever laid eyes on. Thank you, International Paper or whoever manages this stretch, for the small amount of misery you have lifted from our shoulders.

That said, our portage from the swamp above the boat-eating rapids was anything but a walk in the park. The water has gone down about a foot (which was disappointing, since we failed to get any photos yesterday to showcase the true horror of the situation) so retrieving the canoe was a little easier, but getting the boat to camp still meant several hours of brutal physical labor hauling it out of the swamp, up moose tracks to the logging slash, and over a mile down a road that hasn’t seen use as a road in at least ten years and as such had quite a number of small trees growing in the middle of it.

If you’re not intimately familiar with a wilderness portage, it goes a little something like this: Drag. Stop. Lift. Carry. Lose sensation in your fingers. Stop. Lift over a log. Stop. Climb over the log. Lift. Carry. Stop. Put wheels on. Drag while partner lifts back end over substantial debris. Stop. Encounter snow. Remove wheels. Drag. Encounter swamp. Climb into swamp, pull canoe in. Float for ten blissful (frigid) yards while partner scouts exit strategy. Repeat, ad infinitum.

Canoeing is a hell of a lot harder when you can’t just keep the boat in the river.

The good: beautiful, clear sunny day with a nice breeze- even though it’s COLD. The bad: we still don’t reeeeeeally know how much farther we have to go/what the river conditions look like between here and the main confluence. The ugly: if we don’t get to at least the Daaquam junction tomorrow and/or make good miles from that point on, we could stand a legitimate chance of running out of food. (Our original plan was that our starting resources would carry us well into New Brunswick. Ice and flooding has thrown a bit of a wrench into that plan.)

As I write this, I’m babysitting our camp. All the gear is out on a line in the sun, including the sleeping bags, which is AWESOME because we smell BAD. Steve is legging his way down the logging road to see if he can figure out where we’re at and/or how far we can portage, or if we should put in where we’re at now. I’m bitterly resentful of the fact that my short legs and slow pace make me pretty well useless in the scouting regard, but as long as I keep doing all the cooking Steve doesn’t seem too bothered.

One last unfortunate note on an otherwise lovely (cold) afternoon: we’ve started seeing bugs. Specifically mosquitoes. Given that we’re still in long underwear and puffies (not to mention still periodically post-holing) this development seems like a real dick move on nature’s part.

Steve’s report last night was that the logging road cut east and petered out in a swamp full of angry beavers, so we figured the best course of action this morning was to put in and hope for the best.

By the river gods’ good graces, we got it.

We woke up to a gorgeous sunny day and a complete collection of dry gear, and we packed up early and lined the boat over the last little spit of rapids below our campsite. We climbed aboard, said a prayer to the river spirits that we wouldn’t hit anything too big to run, and crossed our fingers that we might actually make it to the confluence.

SMOOTH. FUCKING. SAILING.

One or two minor rips around big rocks, and one or two blind turns that made us a little uneasy since we weren’t sure exactly where we were on the map, but otherwise GORGEOUS. Remote swamplands; evergreen forests lined with cattails and short mossy banks into the trees; a few young moose who were exceptionally startled to see us; ducks all around. THIS is the romantic wilderness paddling experience people envision when they plan this sort of thing.

Within an hour we’d connected with the Daaquam. We shrugged out of the top halves of our dry suits and revelled in the warm sunshine and our pleasantly quick cruising speed. Every so often one of us would break our happy contemplative silence by shouting “OH MY GOD. WE’RE CANOEING.”

Roughly two and a half weeks later than originally planned, we cruised into Ledge Rapids Camp at 1:15… having covered about thirteen miles in less than two hours. (Sometimes floodwaters are terrifying, and sometimes they’re absolutely magical.) We called it for the day, hung the dry suits up to air out, and parked it on the front porch of the cabin to relax in the sun and kick the rest of the scotch.

I’m in shorts. We’re no longer worried about running out of food; there aren’t ice chunks in the water; all the rapids we’ve hit have been so far under water that they barely register as blips on the radar.

AND WE SAW PEOPLE!! Three guys in a pair of boats stopped in to sign the register, and one of them was a local river guide who made helpful notes on our maps and told us that everything from here to Big and Big Black Rapids should be no big deal at these water levels. They had a fresh weather report: clear and sunny for the next three days. BRILLIANT. He also let us know there were beds available at his family’s bunkhouse/restaurant in Allagash (the Kelly Camp and Two Rivers Lunch) if we wanted to splurge for a night or two once we got downriver.

All of this would have been amazing from a normal viewpoint, but given the three weeks of absolute hell we went through to get here this is downright SUBLIME. We’re both so happy/relieved/grateful to be here, to have each other’s company, and to be in this delightful weather and stupidly pretty scenery.

OH MY GOD. WE’RE CANOEING.

At this point we’ve made the transition to feel like we’re on vacation instead of in some sort of semi-frozen purgatory.

After a surprisingly mouse-free night in the Ledge Rapids cabin, we woke up to another cloudless day. Faced with a quick current and the choice of big miles or small meals, we set a lofty mileage goal of 46 and an ending point of the Big Black campsite well downriver. This would put us through Basford Rips and the Big Black Rapids, two of the three spots we were mildly concerned about.

The morning started with a lovely pot of coffee in the sun on the porch and an aggressively-close helicopter flyby (more on that later). We got on the water around 10:30; later than we’d hoped, but after catching up to and passing the gentlemen we’d met the previous day within the first two hours, we calculated our cruising speed at eight miles per hour and didn’t feel too bad.

Overall the paddling was spectacular. The scenery is stunning; trees, untouched riverbanks, a handful of pristine campsites, vast expanses of marshland full of birds and gently waving grasses. Periodically we come across a stretch where the ice floe is still on the bank, six or seven feet above the water line. THAT is always a little eerie, especially knowing we’d been in the water with some of those chunks of ice a week or so earlier.

As promised, the rapids we passed weren’t anything to worry about in high water; we bounced over them easily and didn’t give anything a second thought… until we came to the turn for Big Black and realized we were too far left to follow the line recommended by our guiding friend.

Waaaaaaayyy too far left. It was only big standing waves, but we took on a bunch of water in the first one we hit. As Steve morosely yelled “OH GOD. IT’S OVER. WE’RE SINKING. IT’S HAPPENING” and I laughed hysterically, we slowly and inevitably swamped. The swim to shore was cold but short and we didn’t lose a single piece of gear, so our spirits were soggy but high as we bailed the boat out on shore.

We coasted into the Big Black campsite midafternoon (having CRUSHED our 46 mile goal in about six hours) and were met by a group of seven or eight old timers who had been running the trip every spring for years (43 of them, in fact!) and were kind enough to feed us a bunch of their leftovers (Beans! Brown bread! Bacon! Steak! Cookies!) while telling us bad jokes and stories about their canoe racing experiences. Bob and Terry were the ringleaders of the crew; Bob and Terry, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I never managed to track you down to thank you again for your hospitality. You guys rock.

The group had a campfire going (the first of our trip!) so we sat around well into the evening with them drinking chaga tea and trading stories, then got to pass out on dry ground in a dry tent smelling like wood smoke after a very satisfying day.